Software

  • VS/TFS 2012.4 (Update 4) RC 2 is available – Brian Harry announces the second release candidate of the Visual Studio and TFS 2012 Update 4. This is the final update of the 2012 product, and the this release candidate is the second of many, a minor update containing key bugfixes and 2013 round tripping compatibility changes.
  • ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit Update – August 2013 – Dean Hume announces the latest update to the ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit, a library which adds various aspects ot ASP.NET MVC for creating HTML 5 based functionality including validation and editor enhancements.
  • Bootstrap 3 released – The BootStrap team announce the release of BootStrap 3.0, the latest incarnation of this responsive web framework. This is a major update to the library including a new look and feel, mobile first support, improved JavaScript throughout, and significantly no support for IE7 / FireFox 3.6 and limited IE8 support.

Information

  • Performance Benchmark Mistakes, Part Four – Eric Lippert has the 4th part of his series on common benchmarking mistakes online at TechPro now with a look at how garbage collection can cause benchmarking errors, looking at some scenarios where GC can have significant effect, and how you can limit its.
  • Customizing controller discovery in ASP.NET Web API – Filip W takes a look at how ASP.NET WebAPI discovers its controllers, looking at how you can get your own code involved in the process to allow you to host assemblies elsewhere.
  • Run ASP.NET Web API Inside Your Application – Ondrej Balas discusses the why and how of hosting ASP.NET Web API inside your own process (in VB) in this Visual Studio Magazine article.
  • Obscure WinDbg Commands, Part 3 – Sasha Goldshtein continues his series looking at some less well know WinDbg functions with a look at the ‘wt’ function along with a look at using conditional commands.
  • Paul Thurrott shares his latest Windows Phone 8 book online (and free) (651 pages, all about using WP8 and many of its app’s…) – Greg Duncan highlights Paul Thurrott’s free 600+ page eBook on Windows Phone 8 and tis applications. This isn’t a developer book, its aimed for ‘normal people’ but certainly has value for application developers to understand the platform.
  • Events: Demystifying Common Memory Leaks – Nick Cosentino discusses the use of events throughout application architectures and explores how memory leaks can occur with these and shares some best practices for ensuring your application doesn’t leak.
  • Versioning your database on a budget with C# and SMO – David Wimbley takes a look at how SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) can give you access to details of your databases usually exposed in database version control and differencing applications in this CodeProject article.
  • Ultimate query tuning – Rob Farley discusses some neat tricks your can use to dramatically improve performance of queries where you generally don’t expect rows to be returned, reducing reads to very minimal values with filtered indexes

Community

  • DDD North 2013 – Session voting for DDD North is now open, and this is your chance to shape the agenda for the event taking place on Saturday 12th October in Sunderland. There is a great selection of sessions proposed, and I’m really looking forward to seeing some of them.